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About Tom Kent

Deputy managing editor and standards editor of The Associated Press, responsible for accuracy and balance across all AP news services. Frequent contributor to forums and conferences on newsroom ethics and organization. Adjunct professor at the School of International Affairs and Journalism School of Columbia University. Former AP correspondent or bureau chief in Russia, Iran, Belgium, Australia and the United States. Graduate of Yale University. Languages: French, Russian, Spanish. @tjrkent

Several AP people took part in last week’s Arab Media Summit in Dubai, a large annual gathering of journalists and news executives from across the Arab world. This year there was substantial interest in user-generated content — how we verify the accuracy of photos and video we find on social networks.

Of course, some news organizations devote little attention to such verification, but most of those we talked to in Dubai understood its importance. News media have to be better than relayers of “whatever’s out there”; viewers look to us to vet what’s true and what’s not. And, ultimately, the truth will win out: false or deceptively labeled images are usually quickly discovered, and the reputations of news organizations that use them are tarnished.

In my presentation, I showed a number of photos that turned out to be false, or labeled in order to mislead. They included a fake photo of the Statue of Liberty with Superstorm Sandy whirling around it and a fake video supposedly showing a young boy pulling a little girl to safety from an attack in Syria.

Our Beirut bureau chief, Zeina Karam, and AP Dubai business writer Aya Batrawy gave a separate session on reporting on the Middle East. Karam spoke about the challenges of reporting on the Syrian civil war while not being able to be in Syria outside of government-controlled territory. Batrawy, who recently filed several stories from Saudi Arabia, said she’s often asked if it’s a hindrance or a help to be a woman journalist in that country. She said being a woman has given her a great advantage because she has access to half the population of women that often male journalists are barred from approaching.

John Daniszewski, AP senior vice president for international news and a speaker last year, joined the AP team at the forum, along with staffers from AP’s commercial operations in London.

Jon Hamm arrives at The Black And Red Ball In Celebration Of The Final Seven Episodes Of “Mad Men” on Wednesday, March 25, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)

A few weeks ago, when the Grammy Awards aired, we sent alerts on the top winners to our subscribers around the world, users of the AP mobile app and our social media followers. This brought us a fierce message from one app user, who said the show hadn’t yet been broadcast on the U.S. West Coast and we’d spoiled the excitement for him.

As a global news organization, there’s no way we can hold up breaking news from events millions of people are watching, like the Grammys, just because not everyone has seen it yet.

But on occasion, we do make efforts to avoid spoilers. Take coverage of TV series like a “Mad Men” finale or the outcome of a competition show such as “The Voice,” whose air times vary depending on time zones. We keep results out of the headlines and trust viewers won’t go further if they don’t want to know the outcome.

There’s also the increasingly common situation where a whole season of shows, like “House of Cards,” is released at once.

Some people will binge-watch them all immediately. But most will view a few at a time, and it’s reasonable not to be in their faces with plot twists they may not want to know about. In such cases, too, we avoid putting any potential spoiler in headlines, and we warn readers within our stories before we talk about a surprise that happens in a later episode.

We also avoid spoiler material in reviews. When we review a play that’s a detective story, we don’t reveal whodunit.

It comes down to trying to tread a line between covering breaking entertainment news as it happens and respecting the suspense many enjoy around the content of entertainment programs themselves.

Sometimes people ask about the “ground rules” when they’re being interviewed or photographed by AP. Previously in this blog, we’ve described what you should expect when working with an AP reporter, photographer or videographer. Here’s that advice again, slightly expanded in light of some questions we’ve been asked:

We want to hear and see your story. We’ll work hard to accurately convey what you say, and to provide background that gives the context for your remarks. If there are other points of view besides yours on the subject at hand, we’ll look to obtain those as well and include them in the story.

We prefer to talk to you directly. We seek to do all interviews in person or by phone, webcam or similar. Sometimes we may ask questions by email. But our story will then characterize our exchange as an email conversation, not an interview.

We want to interview you on the record, and to use your name in our story, radio report, video piece or photo caption. We owe it to our readers and viewers to be straight about your identity. We can quote you anonymously in some cases but our rules are quite strict. We won’t quote you anonymously on your opinion, only on matters of fact. We do not grant anonymity unless it is the only way to get information that is essential to the story. We will need to tell our readers why you insisted on anonymity. (We are particularly reluctant to quote anonymously company or government officials whose official duties include speaking to the news media.) Also, if we quote you anonymously in a story, we cannot quote you on the record, elsewhere in the story, as refusing to comment.

We almost never obscure a face in photos or video. On rare occasions we can take photos and video from an angle that does not identify the person. Any such issues should be discussed with the photographer or videographer.

We cannot show you our story, or the images we’ve taken, before publication. (AP reporters are free, however, to double-check facts or quotes with you at their initiative.)

We cannot provide a full list of questions in advance of the interview. We may specify some areas we intend to ask about, but we always reserve the right to ask about something else.

We cannot agree not to ask about specific topics. If we ask about something you don’t wish to discuss, you can decline to comment and we’ll report that.

Once AP publishes its report, contact the reporter or editor if you believe anything is incorrect. We take accuracy very seriously and will correct any errors.

In this Sept.19, 2012 file photo, Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, displays a front page of the newspaper as he poses for photographers in Paris. AP moved this image on the wire this week. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

The attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris raised many questions about how news agencies handle controversial images. We answered some of them Wednesday in response to calls from reporters and bloggers. Below is a summary of the questions and our replies.

Did AP run the Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocking Islam?AP tries hard not to be a conveyor belt for images and actions aimed at mocking or provoking people on the basis of religion, race or sexual orientation. We did not run the “Danish cartoons” mocking Muhammad in 2005, or the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the same type. While we run many photos that are politically or socially provocative, there are areas verging on hate speech and actions where we feel it is right to be cautious.

This policy is consistent with our approach to sound bites and text reporting, where we avoid racist, religious and sexual slurs.

But don’t such images and speech sometimes make news?They do, and we may need to describe hate speech and images when they lead to attacks or arrests. But we limit ourselves to brief descriptions, often without the images or slurs themselves. Routinely publicizing hate speech and images can lead to a “can-you-top-this” situation where provocateurs produce increasingly offensive material for news media to lap up and redistribute, accusing them of censorship when they fail to bite. We don’t want to fan such flames.

We also believe we should not rotely transmit propaganda images designed to sow fear and terror. These could include images that display hostages in demeaning situations, prisoners being abused or the bloodied bodies of vanquished enemies. Sometimes such images, or crops of them, may be essential to convey an event.

On occasion we’ve run a few seconds of video of a hostage. We also ran the well-known photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But any such material requires discussion by our editors and a judgment that it is truly newsworthy. We never transmit such material simply because “it’s out there” and others are carrying them.

What about images mocking Christianity or Judaism?We try to be even-handed. We have declined to run cartoons demeaning Jews and the Holocaust, although we have referred to them in stories when the reaction to them has made news. In the urgency of a 24-hour newsroom, some images get through despite our best efforts; we removed from our service some photos we put out showing a crowd in Afghanistan burning a cross to disparage Christianity.

These are AP news policies for the pictures we distribute in our news reports. In addition, the company has a separate commercial photo business called AP Images that, among other things, has an archive of 22 million photos, including AP pictures that predate our current editorial standards and pictures from many other photo partners. Sometimes photos that don’t meet our current editorial standards are found among those millions of pictures.

Thus, on Wednesday we removed from AP Images some Charlie Hebdo cartoons that had come from a non-AP source. We also became aware that a 25-year-old image of the controversial “Piss Christ” photo was among the photos there, and removed it. Of course, every removal is a judgment call, and we took some flak over the decision on “Piss Christ.”

We learned long ago that some of our news decisions will be controversial. While there’s certainly a slippery slope that leads to avoiding any image that could cause offense, there’s an equally slippery one that leads to suspending our editorial judgment and allowing our news service to be hijacked by whatever offensive image is circulating on a given day. Our best approach is to try to be as thoughtful and even-handed as we can, knowing we’ll sometimes be criticized for a decision not everyone likes.

But what about the censorship issue? Who is the AP to decide what images the world will see?This question was more valid a couple of decades ago, when a very small number of international news agencies “owned the wires” that distributed photos around the world. If the agencies chose not to run a photo, few were likely ever to see it. Even at that time, we felt a responsibility to use our judgment and distribute only those photos we were comfortable with.

But now the censorship argument has largely evaporated. The most hotly disputed images of recent years can usually be found easily via search engines and social networks by anyone who wants to see them. In the Internet era, we are free to edit our news service in line with our own professional consciences and the valid needs of our readers and subscribers without people being able to claim we’re making some decision for the entire world. We have an editorial policy, and that’s what you get from AP.

Every few weeks we distribute to the AP staff examples of great saves by our staffers who protected us from hoaxes and inaccuracies. Here are some of the latest:

A SUSPECT SNIPER
The video looked like it had been shot on the front lines of Syria’s civil war. It looked so real that the Islamic State group’s official website posted it as a de facto event, which drove up its popularity. The footage opens with a young boy on the ground, apparently shot by a sniper as he attempts to save a nearby girl. The boy gets up after the first apparent gunshot wound and the viewer can hear distinct Syrian voices in the background celebrating the boy’s survival. Then, as he gets up and runs toward the girl again, he is “shot” a second time, a cloud of smoke billowing from his midsection as he falls forward. As impossible as it sounds, he gets up again, takes the young girl by the hand and runs out of view of the camera as more shots are fired at his feet. Millions of YouTube viewers watched and shared the viral content. Some other news organizations picked up the video and treated it as authentic. The AP did not. When the video emerged, Jon Gambrell and Patrick Quinn in Cairo were skeptical. They noted the quality of the footage, the steady camera position, likely on a tripod, and the clear audio. There was a lack of blood and the miraculous nature of the boy’s repeated survival. They decided to avoid the video. After the video had made its rounds, the BBC reported that the dramatic footage was actually shot in Malta, using professional actors, cameras and audio gear. The producers even employed Syrian refugees as the convincing voices in the background. The group that produced the film said they wanted to bring attention to children in war zones and presented it as real because they thought it would get more attention that way.

CALM DOWN, EVERYONE: PELE IS FINE
Soccer great Pele’s health had been hospitalized for treatment of a urinary tract infection. Suddenly, the hospital released an alarming-sounding statement saying the 74-year-old Pele had suffered “clinical instability” and had to be transferred to a “special care unit.” Some news outlets quickly filed stories saying that Pele’s condition had worsened and hinted his life was in danger. AP’s sports writer in Brazil, Tales Azzoni, decided to be careful with the hospital’s badly worded statement, especially because it wasn’t clear enough to allow us to say that Pele’s condition had deteriorated significantly. Azzoni was able to contact one of Pele’s spokesmen and it turned out that the former player was doing just “fine.” After Pele was released from the hospital on Tuesday, doctors confirmed in a news conference that his life was never in danger as suggested by many reports. Pele was eventually transferred to an intensive care unit, but it wasn’t because of any serious complications. Pele had already used his Twitter account to calm fears over his health, and in the news conference he said the illness was “a scare” but he never feared for his life. One of Pele’s agents wrote Azzoni an email saying that she was glad we reported it correctly to “calm everyone down!”

NOT A QUEEN PLOT
With Islamic State militants regularly threatening Western interests, the headlines seemed plausible enough: a plot against Queen Elizabeth II had been foiled in London and the suspects were in custody. It is true that the queen is a terrorist target, in general, and that she prefers light rather than intense security. It was also true that there had been terror-related arrests just days before the Queen was to lead a national ceremony honoring British armed forces members who had died in action. But it wasn’t true that the two things were linked, as one British paper reported, and others quickly followed. The AP held off and instead started to make calls. London’s acting chief of bureau, Greg Katz, contacted British intelligence sources at MI5, who told him that the reports were not true. The arrests, which we reported, may or may not lead to charges, and may or may not have been related to a plot on UK soil.

BEARLY REALISTIC
Caleb Jones at AP’s New York Nerve Center spotted video that had been posted to Facebook by an outdoors group in New York state. In the video, a mountain biker wearing a GoPro camera sees a bear charging toward him. The man speeds off, looking over his shoulder periodically as the bear continues to chase behind him. Finally, he comes to some brush on the trail, hops off his bike and watches as the large bear appears to be spooked away by what sounds like gun shots. The video was dramatic, though Caleb was quick to determine that the video shows a brown bear, not native to New York, and expressed skepticism in his initial email. East Assistant Regional Editor Jeff McMillan concurred that it seemed fishy and suggested that someone on the video team check into it. Video Content Manager Walter Ratliffe spotted other videos on YouTube that appeared to possibly contain source video from which a fake edit might have been made. Social Media Editor Eric Carvin noted that lighting on the image of the bear did not appear to match its surroundings and there were other video artifacts present suggesting an edit. User-generated content specialist Hannah Cushman noted that it seemed highly unlikely that someone would get off his bike in this situation. And finally Walter again checked out the group’s YouTube page and found a more obviously faked video of a puppy ice bucket challenge. The video has gone viral, but AP was quick to determine it is not real.

We salute these staffers for protecting AP’s excellent record for accuracy.

Yesterday we distributed some guidance to our staff on coverage of Ebola and enterovirus, two diseases much in the news.

On Ebola, we said that since the United States now has its first diagnosis of the virus, we’re likely to hear increasingly of “suspected cases” in the U.S. and elsewhere. We should exercise caution over these reports.

Often the fact of an unconfirmed case isn’t worth a story at all. On several occasions already, in the U.S. and abroad, we have decided not to report suspected cases. We’ve just stayed in touch with authorities to monitor the situation.

Considerations in writing about a suspected case might be whether the report has caused serious disruption or public reaction. And, of course, we’d have to have information on the case from a solid source. We should also know how many suspected cases in the country or region involved have turned out, in fact, not to be Ebola.

In the United States, the CDC has — as of now — received about 100 inquiries from states about illnesses that initially were suspected to be Ebola, but after taking travel histories and doing some other work, were determined not to be. Of 15 people who actually underwent testing, only one _ the Dallas patient _ has tested positive.

On enterovirus, currently being reported in parts of the United States, the extent of the outbreak of enterovirus 68 is not clear. As our medical writers have pointed out, it’s not a disease that must be reported, and only very sick patients may be tested for it. Almost all victims are children. Four people infected with the virus have died, but it’s not clear what role the illness played in their deaths.

The germ is not new. It was first identified in 1962 and has caused clusters of illness before, including in Georgia and Pennsylvania in 2009 and Arizona in 2010. It’s possible the bug spread in previous years as much as it has this year, but was never distinguished from illness caused by other germs.

Here is a Q&A we ran Friday on enterovirus. It’s by Mike Stobbe, one of our experts on communicable diseases.

A style note: AP normally does not capitalize the names of diseases, like enterovirus. But when a disease is known by the name of a person or geographical area, we capitalize the proper noun: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Ebola virus (from the Ebola River in Congo).

Back in June we talked in this blog about AP’s preferred abbreviation for the fast-growing Islamic militant group in Iraq and Syria, known variously at the time as ISIL and ISIS. We explained why our preference was ISIL.

Things then changed with ISIL’s decision in July to rebrand itself as the “Islamic State.” In a recent story, we explained that AP now refers to the organization as “the Islamic State group” (not simply “the Islamic State”) and the reason for this approach.

The story is below:

By VIVIAN SALAMA Associated Press

BAGHDAD (AP) — Propaganda has been one of the core strategies of the Sunni militant group in Syria and Iraq that today calls itself the Islamic State — and its name is very much a part of that.

In July, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced its rebranding. He declared that the territory under his control would be part of a caliphate, or an Islamic state, shortening its name from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL — the acronym used by the Obama administration and the British Foreign Office to this day. The Levant can refer to all countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt.

Different translations for the name of the al-Qaida splinter group have emerged since the early days of its existence.

Some have chosen to call it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The final word in Arabic — al-Sham — can be translated as Levant, Syria, or as Damascus.

Arab governments have long refrained from using Islamic State, instead referring to it by the Arabic acronym for its full original name, Daesh — short for Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham.

Kurdish citizens who live in Lebanon hold Arabic placards that read, “To be Yazidi means love, accord and peace” and “No to killing the Yazidi sect by Daesh” during a demonstration against the Islamic State group, in front of the UN building, in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, Monday Sept. 15, 2014. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Several residents in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city which fell to the extremist group in June, told The Associated Press that the militants threatened to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh, instead of referring to the group by its full name, saying it shows defiance and disrespect. The residents spoke anonymously out of fear for their safety.

The inconsistency, while confusing for some, has not deterred the group’s growing exposure on social media, with so many hashtags, posts and tweets ultimately directing readers and viewers to their news. Despite being associated to about a half-dozen names and acronyms, the group’s brutal objectives are becoming increasingly clear.

Prior to the group’s self-declared rebranding in July, The Associated Press opted to refer to it as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, believing it was the most accurate translation.

The AP now uses phrases like “the Islamic State group,” or “fighters from the Islamic State group,” to avoid phrasing that sounds like they could be fighting for an internationally recognized state.

“The word ‘state’ implies a system of administration and governance,” said David L. Phillips, the director of Peace-Building and Rights Program at Columbia University. “It’s not a term that would be used to characterize a terrorist group or militia that is merely rolling up territory.”

“Part of their strategy is to establish administration over lands that they control so that they demonstrate that they are more than just a fighting force,” Phillips added. Equally problematic is the use of the word “Islamic” in its name, with some calling it blasphemous.

On Wednesday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius referred to the group as Daesh, calling them “butchers” who do not represent Islam or a state. He urged others to do the same.

Egypt’s top Islamic authority, Grand Mufti Ibrahim Negm, last month called on the international community to refer to the group as “al-Qaida separatists” and not the Islamic State.

“Their savage acts don’t coincide with the name of Islam,” said Sunni cleric Hameed Marouf Hameed, an official with Iraq’s Sunni religious endowment. “They incite hatred, violence and killing and these acts have no place in any real Islamic state.”

___

Associated Press reporters Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad, Angela Charlton in Paris and Greg Katz in London contributed to this report.

Every few weeks, I share with the AP staff some “great saves” by staffers who protected AP and its subscribers from hoaxes and inaccuracies. Here are some recent ones:

● Hours after an Air Algerie plane disappeared over Africa, Twitter blew up with claims that Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro and niece of Fidel Castro, was on the plane. The information came from a Facebook post by the airport in Burkina Faso where the flight began, and said Castro was on the manifest. Major newspapers in Argentina, Spain and the UK went with the story online, as did some U.S. outlets. AP Havana quickly reached a source close to Mariela Castro, who said she was not on the plane. Another source told AP she was at a conference at a Havana hotel. Newswoman Andrea Rodriguez drove to the hotel and persuaded a press official to crack open a door to the closed event: there was Mariela Castro speaking from a lectern.

● A tweet went out from “Glee” star Chris Colfer’s verified account to his 2.5 million followers that said he was leaving the Fox show because of “personal issues.” Retweets went out to millions more, and a series of news outlets soon reported the news. Not the AP, however. Even though the account was verified as being legitimate by Twitter, TV writer Frazier Moore followed AP policy that even tweets from verified and familiar accounts need to be confirmed before we report them. So Moore fired off immediate emails to representatives of “Glee,” Fox and Colfer. Within a couple of minutes, Moore got his responses: Colfer wasn’t going anywhere. The actor’s account had been hacked and the tweet was bogus. Others sent corrections.

● On July 14, several news outlets carried stories with headlines like “It’s a miracle! Dead child wakes up at funeral.” The stories said a 2-year-old girl in the Philippines died but moved a finger and had a weak pulse at her funeral. The tale seemed too good to be true, and was just that. Manila correspondent Oliver Teves learned that others published the story without thoroughly investigating the claim. The girl was dead and had been buried. A health official had gone to her village and used a cardiac monitor to confirm there was no heartbeat, no breath and no pulse. She attributed the girl’s lack of rigor mortis _ one of the conditions that people cited to claim she was alive _ to her small muscle mass. We stayed away from the story.

● It would have been big news. On July 17, several news organizations quoted an Israeli official as saying Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire deal that was to take effect at 6 a.m. the next day. We received several requests for the story. But AP staffers Karin Laub and Mohammad Daraghmeh decided to check further. Daraghmeh quickly got in touch with a top aide of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who told him the report was baseless. Other news organizations soon had to backtrack.

In stories about gay marriage in the United States, we usually include the number of states where gay marriage is allowed. Settling on that that number can be complicated, though, since the situation in some states is in flux.

In Colorado, for instance, gay marriages are going forward in some jurisdictions. But the legality of gay marriage in the state remains tied up in appeals.

So what number do we use when we need a quick, short answer?

Our approach is not to count a state as allowing gay marriage until all appeals have been exhausted and/or state leaders have committed to dropping appeals.

By that standard, we don’t count Colorado. As of now, our count is that same-sex marriage is legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

How best to refer to the al-Qaida splinter group leading Sunni militants in Iraq? ISIL or ISIS?

In Arabic, the group is known as Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The term “al-Sham” refers to a region stretching from southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt (also including Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan). The group’s stated goal is to restore an Islamic state, or caliphate, in this entire area.

The standard English term for this broad territory is “the Levant.” Therefore, AP’s translation of the group’s name is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.

“We believe this is the most accurate translation of the group’s name and reflects its aspirations to rule over a broad swath of the Middle East,” says John Daniszewski, AP vice president and senior managing editor for international news.

The term ISIL also avoids the common misunderstanding, stemming from the initials ISIS, that the group’s name is the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” (“Iraq and Greater Syria” might be an acceptable translation, since Greater Syria also implies the entire area of the Levant.) But saying just “Iraq and Syria” suggests incorrectly that the group’s aspirations are limited to these two present-day countries.

ISIL is also the term used by the United Nations.

—
This note was corrected on June 18 to reflect that al-Sham does not include Iraq.